Out on the Cutting Edge

We ate at the tin-topped table in the kitchen. I tried to move the flowers to give us more room but she wouldn't let me. "I want them where I can see them," she said. "There's plenty of room."

She had gone shopping that morning, and besides coffee she'd stocked up on fruit juice and soft drinks.

I had a Coke. She got out a bottle of Beck's for herself, but before she opened it she made sure it wouldn't bother me.

"Of course not," I said.

"Because nothing goes with Chinese food like beer. Matt, is it all right to say that?"

"What, that beer goes well with Chinese food? Well, it may be a controversial statement, and I suppose there are some wine growers somewhere who'd give you an argument, but so what?"

"I wasn't sure."

"Open your beer," I said. "And sit down and eat."

Everything was delicious, and the shrimp dish was the treat she'd promised. They'd included disposable chopsticks with our order and she used a pair. I had never learned to handle them and stuck with a fork.

I told her she was good with the chopsticks.

"It's easy," she said. "It just takes practice. Here. Try."

I made an effort, but my fingers were clumsy. The sticks kept crossing and I couldn't get any food to my mouth. "This would be good for someone on a diet," I said. "You'd think somewhere along the way they could have invented the fork. They invented everything else, pasta, ice cream, gunpowder."

"And baseball."

"I thought that was the Russians."

We finished everything, just as she'd predicted. She cleared the table, opened a second bottle of Beck's.

"I'll have to learn the ground rules," she said. "I feel a little funny about drinking in front of you."

"Do I make you uncomfortable?"

"No, but I'm afraid I'll make you uncomfortable. I didn't know if it was all right to talk about how great beer is with Chinese food because, oh, I don't know. Is is all right to talk about booze that way?"

"What do you think we do at meetings? We talk about booze all the time. Some of us spend more time talking about it than we used to spend drinking it."

"But don't you tell yourselves how terrible it was?"

"Sometimes. And sometimes we tell each other how wonderful it was."

"I never would have guessed that."

"That didn't surprise me as much as the laughter. People tell about the damnedest things that happened to them, and everybody breaks up."

"I wouldn't think they'd talk about it, let alone laugh. I guess I thought it would be like mentioning rope in

the house of the hanged."

"In the house of the hanged," I said, "that's probably the chief topic of conversation."

* * *

Later she said, "I keep wanting to bring the flowers in here. That's crazy, there's no room for them.

They're better in the kitchen."

"They'll still be there in the morning."

"I'm like a kid, aren't I? Can I tell you something?"

"Sure."

"God. I don't know if I should tell you this. Well, with that preamble, I guess I have to, don't I? Nobody ever gave me flowers before."

"That's pretty hard to believe."

"Why is it so hard to believe? I spent twenty years devoting myself heart and soul to revolutionary politics. Radical activists don't give each other flowers. I mean, talk about your bourgeois sentimentality, your late capitalist decadence. Mao said let a thousand flowers bloom, but that didn't mean you were supposed to pluck a handful and take them home to your sweetie. You weren't even supposed to have a sweetie. If a relationship didn't serve the party, you had no business in it."

"But you got out of there a few years ago. You were married."

"To an old hippie. Long hair and fringed buckskin and love beads.

He should have had a 1967 calendar

on his wall. He was locked in the sixties, he never knew they'd ended." She shook her head. "He never brought home flowers.

Flowering tops, yes, but not flowers."

"Flowering tops?"

"The most potent part of the marijuana plant. Cannabis sativa, if you want to be formal. Do you smoke?"

"No."

"I haven't in years, because I'm afraid it would lead me right back to cigarettes. That's funny, isn't it?

They try to scare you that it'll lead to heroin, and I'm afraid it might lead to tobacco. But I never liked it that much. I never liked feeling out of control."

The flowers were still there in the morning.

I hadn't intended to stay the night, but then I hadn't planned on dropping in on her in the first place. The hours just slipped away from us. We talked, we shared silences, we listened to music, and to the rain.

I awoke before she did. I had a drunk dream. They're not uncommon, but I hadn't had one in a while.

The details were gone by the time I got my eyes open, but in the dream someone had offered me a beer and I had taken it without thinking. By the time I realized I couldn't do that, I'd already drunk half of it.